[EDITOR'S DRAFT] Verifiable Claims Working Group Primer

It is currently difficult to transmit banking account information, proof of
age, education qualifications, healthcare data, and other sorts of verified
personal information via the Web. These sorts of data are often referred to as
verifiable claims. The mission of the Verifiable Claims
Working Group is to make expressing, exchanging, and verifying claims easier
and more secure on the Web.

Problem Statement

In existing attribute exchange architectures (like SAML, OpenID Connect,
Login with SuperProviderX, etc.) users, and their verifiable claims, do not
independently exist from service providers. This leads to vendor lock-in,
fragmentation of identity across different services, reduced competition in
the marketplace, and reduced privacy for all stakeholders. There is no
interoperable standard capable of expressing and transmitting verifiable
claims that works the same across industries (e.g., finance, retail,
education, and healthcare). This leads to fragmented industry-specific
solutions that are costly and inefficient.

The Proposal

Fig. 1 - The structure of a set of verifiable claims

The Credentials Community Group and the Verifiable Claims Task Force of the
Web Payments Interest Group have extensively researched the problem and
proposed an architecture and specification to enable the interoperable
expression, exchange, and verification of claims. The narrow scope of work
in the draft Verifiable Claims Working Group Charter proposes that the first
step toward broad interoperability is standardizing a data model and
syntaxes for the expression and verification of verifiable claims.

Specifically, the Verifiable Claims Working Group will Recommend:

a data model and syntax(es) for the expression of rich verifiable claims,
including one or more core vocabularies.

a note specifying how these data models should be used with existing
attribute exchange protocols, a suggestion that existing protocols should
be modified, or a suggestion that a new protocol is required to address the
problems stated earlier in this document.

The Working Group will NOT define a new protocol for attribute exchange or
JavaScript browser APIs. These work items may be proposed at a future date
if there is support for them, but are not necessary to successfully achieve
the first step of interoperability.

Is the proposal mature enough for standardization?

Yes. The work on this proposal has been incubated in multiple
W3C Community Groups for several years and has benefited from wide review
during that time period. There are commercial pilot projects underway that
utilize the technology.

Is the scope narrow?

Yes. The groups that have put forward the proposal went to
great lengths to reduce the scope as much as possible to a clearly achievable
first step.

Fig. 2 - Verifiable Claims Working Group scope

Is the proposal supported by Industry?

Yes. A recent survey of 56 organizations from diverse
industries show strong support for the problem statement, goals, scope of
work, and use cases.

Why is a W3C standard necessary?

Cross-industry interoperability. Proprietary industry-specific
solutions for verifiable claims exist but due to their narrow nature they
often fail to scale outside of a particular industry. A number of survey
respondents observed that the W3C tends to offer more robust solutions that
work across industries. In addition, the Verifiable Claims specification is
built on top of technologies standardized at W3C. For these reasons the
majority of survey respondents believe that W3C is the right place to do this
work.

Has support for the proposal gained traction in the last year?

Yes. A survey of organizations involved with verifiable claims
was performed last year and received 38 supportive responses. The most recent
survey garnered 52 supportive responses, some from multiple multi-billion
dollar corporations and government bodies, showing significant and increasing
support for the work. After changes to the charter, a few large organizations
changed their position from not supporting or ambivalence to moderate or strong
support.